Brian Aldiss - The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

‘Do you paint in the holidays?’ she asked.

‘Oh yes, pretty often.’ I had never touched a paintbrush since I was about six.

She asked me where I lived. I told her. She was pleased. Pleasure always caused her to raise her eyebrows slightly, as if her pleasure somewhat amazed her.

‘I don’t live too far from you. Have you heard of Traven House? Perhaps you’d like to come sketching with me some time? I could get the chauffeur to come and pick you up in the car. We have some lovely views in our grounds.’

Confusedly, I said it would be lovely. She asked me what my father did. I said he was a bank manager, adding defensively, ‘And he belongs to the Rotary Club.’

She told me her father was a rear-admiral. But he had been retired from the Navy at an early age because of some disgrace in the China seas. Now he was a press magnate. Not that I knew what that was.

Learning to distinguish between facts and fantasies is one of the most vital arts that separates childhood from adulthood. Some people – politicians, actors, the mentally sick – never acquire the art.

Crisis-time for breaking from the childhood world where fact and fantasy intermingle comes in adolescence. In the next school holiday I was tortured by this crisis.

Sister had promised she would come and take me out to sketch with her. But was she just playing a game? Something in her demeanour, that half-jesting expression of hers, suggested that she was.

On the other hand, I had a strong faith in the unlikely. The stately home, the chauffeur, and no doubt the Rolls-Royce, were much more probable and acceptable to me than the whole formidably unlikely organization of Branwells, which, possibly because I had been sent there at a relatively late age, I could never take for granted.

The one bit of unlikeliness with which I could not come to terms was that this sophisticated woman could love me, or be at all interested in me.

That proved to be fact and not fantasy. She did duly arrive to take me out, although the episode developed in a way I had not expected. My parents did not refuse to let me go out with Sister at the last moment, as I had dreaded they would. Ever since Nelson said jokingly, ‘So you’ve started chasing older women, eh?’, I feared my father would read my amorous intentions in my expression and stop everything.

He did not. Nor did Beatrice get Sister on one side and tell her ‘what he is really like’. Nor, for that matter, did Sister turn up in a Rolls-Royce. Nor did the Rear-Admiral accompany her!

My relations with Mother were still painful. Although she had by now abandoned the device of threatening to leave us if we were bad, she had developed another tiresome device. If we did anything that pained her, she would cover her eyes and pretend to cry, often actually did cry, and shriek that she was the most miserable of women.

We saw through this at once. Her little darling Ann saw through it first – it was, after all, something of a feminine ploy. Without being taken in, we would nevertheless go boredly to comfort her, since that was the easiest way to silence her and have the embarrassing behaviour out of the way. I believe we held precisely this condescending attitude to her ever since Ann was seven. As this meant that we dropped whatever we were doing that offended her, she thus got her way, and so the situation was self-perpetuating.

That was only a minor tyranny. On the subject of girls, Mother was more difficult. I used to look hungrily at them in the street, the half-challenging, half-inviting stare of the shy man. If they returned the stare, Mother would say, ‘Huh, she must be a cheap little bit, giving anyone the glad-eye on the street like that! You want to look out for that kind, my boy – they’ll only get you into a lot of trouble!’

When the enemy threatened to materialize into the shape of Sister, she was nonplussed. For this wasn’t an ordinary girl friend. This was a member of the staff of Horatio’s school, a school official. It was unthinkable that she could – or that he could – well, it was unthinkable. But she had considerable qualms about the outing, and the more I artlessly stressed the painting line, the more Mother seemed to worry. Father was just sarcastic.

‘She’s a bit old for you to be going out with, isn’t she?’

So she bloody well was. But it just happened that she happened to show a bit of personal interest.

Sister changed the arrangement once or twice, each time to my alarm. But the date held up, though I imagined her saying to the old Admiral over a cocktail, ‘It’s an absolute bore, Daddy, but I must take the spotty little blighter out, since I promised to do so in a weak moment. Noblesse oblige and all that!’

She dropped me a note to say when she would be round to the house to pick me up. Panic! I was the first to panic! Supposing that my mother guessed how much I fancied Sister when she saw us together! Or – supposing Mother and her affectations put Sister off! Supposing the house put her off! Supposing the smell of beer in the living-room put her off!

In my anxiety and general uncertainty I failed to let Mother know when Sister was calling for me until a couple of hours before she arrived – and then Mother was thrown into panic.

‘I’ll have to change my frock! We’d better have lunch early. Ann and Rosemary will have to play in the back garden. You might have warned me, darling! And you say she’s one of the Travens of Traven House? What posh circles you move in, Horatio! I’ve passed Traven House going north – you can just see it between the trees. She’s going to take you there?’

‘Yes, so she said.’

‘Lovely! You’d better wear your best suit. I wish you’d had your hair cut! You will speak up if the Admiral talks to you, won’t you? I’ll give you ten bob, darling, just in case you need it. We’ll have to have her in here – I hope she doesn’t get the whiff of beer or she’ll think your mother’s a secret drinker!’

We were still running in circles, and Ann had no shoes on, when Sister arrived; she was her usual quiet self, with that gentle smile which invited you to be friendly – a ‘distinguished’ smile, Ann called it, for even she was impressed.

‘But she was so nice !’ Mother said several times afterwards, astonished that it should be so. ‘Do you think she’d like to come to tea one day?’

It was cheering to know that Mother and Ann admired her (though what would they say if they guessed how I felt?). And it was cheering that Sister appeared not to notice the aroma of beer as she stood for a moment, small and individual, in our drawing-room before we left.

The car proved to be, not a Rolls-Royce, not even a flashy little two-seater, but a battered old Ford. Sister said something about the other cars not being available. And we weren’t going back to Traven House. She felt like a drive to Grantham instead.

None of that worried me in the slightest; I hardly heard what she said. The great triumph was to be with her, and in the holidays at that! I sat beside her blushing scarlet from head to navel; for I saw that she had not bothered to bring along any paints at all. On the back seat of the car were not sketching pads but cushions. Clear evidence she was going to drive me somewhere and seduce me!

There I sat, feverishly clutching my own sketching block and paints, and now and again feeling the one French letter in my pocket – the remaining one of the two left over from the Esmeralda affair; I had used the other for tossing off into, and lent it out at school for the same purpose. Now the unused one was to be put to a real test, and I was scared at the prospect.

To my relief and disappointment, Sister intended no seduction. We ate lunch together and strolled round gazing at the shops. We passed an Army Recruiting Centre; she put her arm through mine and asked, ‘Which service will you join if there’s a war against Germany?’